Dude you might not like them living outside. I don't know about the German ones but here we have what is locally called the "VC cockroach" named because it is as tough as the Viet Cong and those things are happy to live outside in the sewers...until the storm drains flood and then they'll try to climb up through the pipes and get into your house. Since they can live without worrying about poisons they get fricking HUGE, we are talking bigger than a grown man's thumb and tough as hell to kill, you can't use an ordinary fly-swat as it won't even stun 'em, you better have a shoe ready and be putting some arm behind your swing, TOUGH bastards.

Roaches are averse to very little. The one thing that kills them dead, and permanent, is boric acid. No - don't try to mix up a poison for them. Just dust the building they infest. Really dust - get it into every crack and crevice, behind light switches, behind wall receptacles, under cabinets, on top of cabinet, under the false floor under your sinks, in the attic, in the basement, get the rafters and floor joists, behind molding, in the heating ducts, hot water tank room, crawlspaces, EVERYWHERE.

I wonder how practical dusting the insides of the walls throughout the house with boric acid would be. I guess it wouldn't be a permanent solution due to moisture (and it is an acid, so it might end badly as it slowly washed away), but it does sound worth trying.

I believe he exaggerated how thoroughly you need to apply the dust. Just be sure you get places that the cockroaches will walk should be enough. Under the stove, refrigerator, on the shelves, etc. And don't remove it.

Mind you, I'm sure his approach would work, I just think it's probably overkill based on what I've heard previously. You do, however, need to be sure the boric acid remains in place, because you will be continually reinfested from where-ever the original infestation came from.

Which just makes them more illogical, not less. For example, I accept that I live in my mother's basement, but I don't accept that I will never get a date. Yet the latter is a consequence of the former.

A quick search appears to show they haven't folded their cards as yet.

Creationists never fold their cards, no matter how many times their claims are refuted.

I remember reading about a debate where the scientist pointed out that the creationist's argument was based on a long-since refuted claim, the creationist replied that they don't rely on that claim anymore, and the scientist then asked "So why is it in the literature you're selling in the lobby?"

I would think that evolutionary theory would predict, and even practically demand, the presence of ID theorists and Creationists of various flavors as part of the scientific community. Every scientific community, and they are segmented, is its own little ecosystem. It has sources of energy (grants), and consumers (scientists) and various forms of reproduction (ideas and new scientists, etc.). Some members of the ecosystem will consume resources, but give little back, or produce poor quality offspring. The herd only improves if the strongest survive. Think of the role of predators taking the weak in any animal stock. In this case it is weak theories and science. By the two communities engaging in adversarial struggle, the weak science is exposed and made stronger. What is passed over in silence by on community is exposed by the other and account demanded. Intellectual rigor increases. Their ways are strange to you, perhaps even irritating. But directly and indirectly they help real science grow stronger, and more innovative. They probably also bring additional funding into the scientific community that it otherwise wouldn't have. And without them, your droll post would have no meaning.

I suspect it's something like the reason physicists don't feel a need to have Time Cube proponentists and historians don't need holocaust deniers.

As the saying goes, you're entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts. If you don't deal in facts, science doesn't need you.

Slightly off topic, but how do IDers explain things like retinas being designed backwards and various other poor design choices for humans? Doesn't the idea become more like "Idiot Design" when considering how badly "designed" we are?

It isn't an idiot designer, as cephalopods have their eyes the right way around. The designer clearly can do it correctly, but chose not to do it with vertebrates. Furthermore, when looking at the way the world works, it becomes clear that the designer is evil, mad or both. All in all, Cthulhu is the best guess at a designer, given the evidence.

I like the way you're thinking there, but I have a counter-example for the whole Intelligent Squid Designer philosophy:

Cephalod gills don't use a counterflow arrangement (where blood and water move in opposite directions) which would provide a maximum concentration gradient. However, the much more efficient counterflow system is used all over the place (e.g. lungs, fish gills, kidneys, penguin feet) but not in cephalopods.

It's almost as if Cthulhu came up with a great design and then decided to give all his children the retard version of it. Maybe he just hates his kids.

Richard Dawkins states the case quite clearly in The Blind Watchmaker:

My second example of an evolutionary progression that didn't
happen because of disadvantageous intermediates, even though it
might ultimately have turned out better if it had, concerns the retina of
our eyes (and all other vertebrates). Like any nerve, the optic nerve is a
trunk cable, a bundle of separate 'insulated' wires, in this case about
three million of them. Each of the three million wires leads from one
cell in the retina to the brain. You can think of them as the wires
leading from a bank of three million photocells (actually three million
relay stations gathering information from an even larger number of
photocells) to the computer that is to process the information in the
brain. They are gathered together from all over the retina into a single
bundle, which is the optic nerve for that eye.
Any engineer would naturally assume that the photocells would
point towards the light, with their wires leading backwards towards
the brain. He would laugh at any suggestion that the photocells might
point away from the light, with their wires departing on the side
nearest the light. Yet this is exactly what happens in all vertebrate
retinas. Each photocell is, in effect, wired in backwards, with its wire
sticking out on the side nearest the light. The wire has to travel over
the surface of the retina, to a point where it dives through a hole in the
retina (the so-called 'blind spot') to join the optic nerve. This means
that the light, instead of being granted an unrestricted passage to the
photocells, has to pass through a forest of connecting wires, presumably
suffering at least some attenuation and distortion (actually
probably not much but, still, it is the principle of the thing that would
offend any tidy-minded engineer!).

The problem with the retina requiring lots of blood flow to protect from overheating is caused by the cells being back to front. The light sensitive layer is directly next to the pigment layer which is the layer that generates the heat, so if you wire them the right way around, you don't get the overheating problems and thus don't need the fast flowing blood to cool them down.

Honestly, look at the design of squid eyes and compare them to human eyes and it's quite obvious which is

I've just realised what you're saying - that it's different layers of cells in the retina to detect different wavelengths. Can you point to any diagram of how you think it works, as I was under the impressions that we have different cone cells in the retina which are sensitive to red, blue or green i.e. different cones in the same "layer" not different layers.

You are complaining to the wrong person. Make your complaint to Black Parrot or some of the other ones up thread. He started it off with a joke post involving ID, started the thread topic, and then made the inquiry I responded to. There are other posts about it as well. Complain to them. If it is OK for them to post on it, it is OK for me to post on it. Fair is fair. If it is just a matter of viewpoint discrimination - well, sorry, but I will continue to post on running topics, but do not agree to one sided discussions.

If you're bored with it, feel free to ignore the posts. I often ignore threads in a story, or even entire stories, in which the discussion is one in which I am uninterested, or at least find to be a lesser priority.

I don't think the ID community would agree that what they do either is, or has, spirituality as a central component to the day to day work. Many of them are working scientists as well. They just hold a particular view about what the ultimate source of everything is. Drop an anvil on your toe and a physicist that ascribes to ID will tell you it was gravity that pulled it to earth, not God's will. A chemist that ascribes to ID will tell you that the anvil is made of high carbon steel with traces of scandium, not "stuff that God holds together." A physician that ascribes to ID will still tell you that the toe has to be amputated. Don't make the mistake of thinking that people that believe either ID or associated beliefs must be stupid.

I know a PhD physicist that graduated from a major research university, is the head of an academic physics department (last I knew), and believed in either ID or Creationism, I forget which. Besides his academic duties, the good doctor does solid research for outside customers and is well regarded in that particular research community. Believing that God exists, created the universe, and established creation in a particular fashion is a very remote question from trying to understand a particular problem in surface physics.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that people that believe either ID or associated beliefs must be stupid.

I don't. I never have. I'm a flirting Christian in that I love some of the tenets of the religion (I don't believe in god yet... that is a small drawback). It's just nothing to do with the scientific method. ID ascribes something to something that by definition cannot be proven or disproven, A book I love to illustrate my views is A J Ayers' "Language, Truth and Logic".

I have not run into a IDer who did not accept that some breeds of dogs, for example, were not crafted identically to the way they are now by God, however many thousand of years ago they think the world was created.

There's really no distinction. What is called macro evolution is determined by hindsight, usually because we are only able to compare fossils separated by millions of years. By definition every organism is a member of the same species as its parents. We only place them into discrete categories for taxonomical convenience. It's not a fact of nature, it's a human contrivance to make doing (some aspects) of biology easier.

It's like natural languages. I speak English, a Germanic language. I can speak to my father and mother just fine. I can speak to my grandfather, and also converse in German with him. If my great-grandfather were still alive I'd doubtless have no trouble speaking to him, too. He could speak to his parents. They could speak to their parents, and so on. Each person in the chain can speak to and understand the people directly around them. But if you go back just a few hundred years, I wouldn't be able to easily converse with my ancestors, despite the fact that there is an unbroken chain connecting them to myself linguistically. Farther back and I wouldn't even recognize the language they're speaking as English, or German. So from microevolution comes macroevolution of languages.

So to with biology. If we had access to a fossil or living specimen of every intermediary individual from single cell to human then the very idea of species would become meaningless, lost in the smooth gradient of gradual change. You could line them all up and walk down the line and see them change, almost imperceptibly from one form into another. Every individual would look so much like his parents and offspring that you wouldn't even be able to tell there was a change at all. But you could compare every 10, 100, or 1000 individuals and see that they are in fact changing. At some point they'd be so different as to need a new name, for humans have an almost pernicious compulsion to place things into discrete categories.

Some people find it impossible to break out of this mindset. Some find that their religion even compels them not to try.

The micro- and macro-evolution terms are clumsy labels for what they're being used to describe.

Mainstream evolution states that each change is an adaptive measure, but that when taken in concert, over time, can results in a distinct organism. From what I understand, some IDers consider evolution to be a purely adaptive mechanism. That is, if you take a bacteria, drop it in a pond, and let evolution run for a billion years, what you'll end up with is bacteria perfectly adapted to life in that pond; it won't

Mutations are random, and most aren't improvements, aren't adaptive. Natural selection then goes to work. The mutations which are better become more numerous by virtue of being better. Detrimental changes terminate the organism's lineage by killing it outright or making it less successful at reproducing. Drop a bacterium into a pond and after a billion years I'd expect to still find bacteria or something analogous in that pond. Ignore the fact that location on the Earth loses meaning at that time scale due to plate tectonics. I'd expect to find bacteria AND lots of other forms of life all over the place everywhere I looked. This demonstrates another misunderstanding ID people have with evolution. Bacteria and humans are equally evolved. We've all been evolving for the same amount of time. Bacteria are just as old as humans, all contemporary species are. No extant species is "less evolved" than any other. You can say they are "more primitive" but what does that really mean? Compared to what?

Anthropocentrism is a vice biologists are broken of early on. Religious people often find the idea that humans aren't special, that the world wasn't made just for us, positively abhorrent. Strangely these same religions often preach humility. What a contradiction.

This demonstrates another misunderstanding ID people have with evolution. Bacteria and humans are equally evolved.

That's not a misunderstanding of ID people; that's a misunderstanding of evolution by people in general. I blame X-Men, but even stuff like Darwin's Radio falls victim to it. Anything that uses the phrase "next phase of human evolution" is probably doing it.

That's why I used the term "complex" rather than "more evolved" or "advanced". Humans are more complex than bacteria, but "evolved" isn't a measure of complexity, it's a measure of adaptivity, and needs to be contextualized. For instance, humans are poor

Complexity is usually a workaround for an detrimental mutation that happened down the line. Evolution is not a championship of the fittest and strongest, but a never ending rerouting around obstacles. The strongest and fittest stay as they are from one generation to another; the outcasts and "damaged good" specimens are pushed to the limbs of their worlds to explore neighboring niches and then evolve into them. Some of them might some day become more powerful then their former "betters", if their evolutiona

Just a quick pointer, most evolution (in mammals at least) isn't through mutations, but through recombination. Just as an example, in humans, on average there is only one new mutation (ie. one corrupted base-pair) per two generations. When you consider the size of the genome is equivalent to 3.5GB of data, that is virtually nothing.

Then compare that to something like HIV, which only has a genome size of 1.2KB of data, but still averages about 1 to 2 mutations per generation.

Fine; I was imprecise. The mainstream perspective of evolutionary history is that the current state of the species are due to beneficial changes in the genome being distributed across a population due to natural selection.

Yes, there are other means of evolution, but in the longterm, the changes themselves are either beneficial (in which case they're distributed across the population), harmful (in which case they're removed from the gene pool), or neutral (in which case, they are present in some individuals,

No, there's a serious misconception here. Neutral traits can become universal in a population, and frequently do. This is especially likely in small populations (which is part of why bottlenecks matter so much).

Which is why I contextualized by saying that it's the perspective on the current state of the species. Yeah, there are niche cases - geographical isolation, no natural predators, or whatever. But by and large, when you look at the evolution of species as a whole, the picture is that of advancement by adaptation.

Take white tigers for an example; yes, due to controlled inbreeding, isolated environments, and being maintained in circumstances where there's no predation, a "negative" trait is spread through a po

The "discrete categories" aren't, as you seem to think, completely arbitrary.

They are for any non sexual species, like most microorganisms. Bacteria don't interbreed.

They are for many geographical species whose only reason of non-interbreeding is that they don't meet.

They are for species with a somewhat more complex live cycle than "parents generate offspring". My pet example is the common dandelion, whose generational cycle can span hundreds of generations, and where most individuals can't interbreed at all.

So, most of the other responses here meet most of the major relevant issues. But one thing that's curious is that while some young earth creationists clam they accept "microevolution" what they mean by this is quite hard to pin down. One common claim is that by microevolution one means evolution below the species level. But Answers in Genesis, the world's largest YEC ministry lists claiming that speciation does not occur as an argument that creationists should not use because the evidence for speciation is so strong. http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-answers/topic/arguments-we-dont-use [answersingenesis.org]. Now, here's the really neat bit: A variety of ID proponents argue that speciation doesn't happen. There's an interview in Expelled where one of the ID proponents says that speciation doesn't happen. This isn't the only example. So it looks like the ID proponents are frequently even more reactionary than the most sophisticated YECs. That's what happens when you are constructing viewpoints to sound just plausible enough to have an appearance of controversy and not actually trying to figure out the truth.

IDes can accept evolution...the only thing they don't accept is that life on the planet was not in some way fashioned for some particular purpose (which was presumably either already fulfilled long ago, or hasn't been completed yet, or else has been completely forgotten about)

And now we have yet another variant of ID, and this version is so vague that it isn't even clear what the point is. Sometime there may ave been a purpose at some point- and this is supposed to be a scientific hypothesis?

ID exists to disguise creationism as something more palatable to be taught in schools or discussed by respectable people. But the proponents aren't very good at having anything like a coherent hypothesis, with each of them trying to decide just how vocal a creationist they'll be and which parts of science they'll reject. ID was made to try to infiltrate public schools under the guise of science, and it shows.

And now we have yet another variant of ID, and this version is so vague that it isn't even clear what the point is. Sometime there may ave been a purpose at some point- and this is supposed to be a scientific hypothesis?

Now you're beginning to understand. First give it a more sciency sounding name and make up sicency sounding "theories". Then try to find some scientific facts which are hard to explain (helps to have a very big stock of them since science has the annoying habit of actually explaining interes

You will get Insightful mods, because it's a good point,and I'll get Flamebait mods because every subsequent mod who sees my comment will see your modded-up comment, and your UID, and mod it up without reading it.

THIS comment, however, will probably get "Informative" mods, but only from those who check the links!;-)

If I were designing them, they'd thrive on the poison in the traps. Of course, if I were designing them, the cockroaches would be the focus of the experiment. I'd throw increasingly difficult challenges at them, culminating in some moderately clever primates. Once the cockroach Alpha arises, it would be saved for future study, and the rest of the experiment would be reset. That's the problem with an intelligent designer, isn't it? One tends to believe that they're the focus of the experiment. One tends to think that they will somehow qualify for special treatment. When, in fact, all that awaits you is euthanasia and a brain dissection. And that's if you're one of the lucky ones.

Yes I know this contradicts the conventional wisdom that HFCS is bad, while sucrose (which your body breaks down into 50% fructose / 50% glucose) is good. But the people pushing that agenda aren't really the types who took chemistry in school. It's just called "high fructose" because it has a larger fraction of fructose than regular syrup, which is mostly glucose.

I have noticed over the past few years that ants in my area have "learned" to avoid consuming Raid borax laced syrup. I remember early on in my house that ants would feast on the stuff, sucking large drops dry in a matter of minutes. Now, the new ants crawl up to the syrup I have left, seem to probe it, and then run away quickly. Even if I applied the syrup to an established ant pathway, they go around the drops without consuming any of it. I don't know whether they are averse to eating the sugar, or whether they can somehow sense the borax in the syrup. There seems to be some evolution going on here.

I have noticed over the past few years that ants in my area have "learned" to avoid consuming Raid borax laced syrup.

Two suggestions. First, if you're mixing your own posion (Raid + borax + syrup) then you might have simply made the mix too strong.

Second, there are sugar ants and fat ants. (I'm sure this is entomologically a gross oversimplification but I think it's fair when talking about invading household ants.) Sugar ants want sweet stuff, fat ants want fat. It might be that your invaders were sugar ants, but now they're fat ants. Try putting a little peanut butter in front of them to see how they react.

I'd have to doubt that. Well, not by detecting radio waves. Radio is just our term for a band of the light spectrum, so it's as old as the universe. No living thing on Earth has evolved to make use of that part of the spectrum like has been done for "visible" light, UV, and infrared. It's probably beyond the reach of natural selection, the same way no animal ever evolved something like a wheel despite being enormously more efficient for travel. The intermediary steps are too difficult and wouldn't confer be

There's a big difference between detecting the rough direction of magnetic North and being able to discern the source of radio waves, and an even bigger difference from being able to pick out specific frequencies against a noisy background. There are also some very good reasons from physics and chemistry [wordpress.com] why a "biological radio" would be impossible to evolve naturally. In short, radio is too low energy to be biologically useful.

Oh and there's an exception about my wheel analogy. Bacteria really did evolve a

Size matters. Pretty much all animal cells (except eggs) are about the same size. Most light-detection systems in animals are arrays of single cells, each detecting a frequency. To detect 2.4ghz radio (wavelength 12.5 cm) you optimally need a 6.25cm long detector. That's larger than any single cell can easily support, and an array of cells to detect it would be unlike any previously evolved light sensor.Which isn't to say it's impossible, just that you need really big cockroaches. Madagascar hissing cockroa

Well it's simple enough to just redesign the roach motel so it baits them with wheat or something, i'd imagine. But part of me wonders if we would be better off just building a mega roach hotel chocked full of actual food in a neighborhood and instead of killing the roaches with glue, just relocating them into the forest when the roach hotel reaches capacity, or using them as feed for fish or something.

This approach might not work out so well with r-strategy breeders [wikipedia.org] --- you'll fill the house up for sure with happy little roaches, but they won't be leaving the neighbors' homes to get there (just exponentially exploding their population to catch up with the expanded resources). Setting up "guard rows" of tasty pesticide-free crops to lure pests away from agricultural fields works to the extent that said pests are highly mobile and individually "exploring" a wide enough area to "find" the guard rows in preference to the main crops. However, roaches tend to locate and nest in one area (with only "excess population" expanding out into new territory) --- some very lucky bugs will find the new house (and start breeding to fill it), but the roaches behind your kitchen cabinets will stay behind to raise their kids behind your kitchen cabinets.

Researchers soon realized that some roaches had developed an aversion to glucose

How does a roach develop an aversion to glucose? Did they eat just a little - not enough for the poison to kill them - and thus learn from the resulting sickness that they shouldn't eat it again? If so how did they pass this knowledge onto their offspring?

Or did strains of cockroaches that already had an aversion to glucose become more prolific since they weren't killed by the roach traps?

I think he was referring to the way the sentence was phrased. Saying the roaches developed an aversion to glucose implies that individual roaches liked glucose, then stopped liking it for some reason. When what happened is the roaches that liked it, all died, and the ones that didn't like it survived and reproduced.

...just to stay in the same place. Natural selection follows from basic principles of logic. It's so close to first principles that it always amazes me that we had to wait so long for Darwin to show up and slap humanity on the face with the simple truth of it. Living things exist because they inherited what it takes to exist from their ancestors. The ones that didn't have what it took to stay in existence...didn't. The world is full of things that exist. Protons, stars, iron, roaches, people. Natural selection acts on everything. The universe itself may even have been "selected" through some process of cosmogenesis where universes that don't have what it takes, physical laws and constant appropriate to produce stars, black holes, daughter universes, see their lineage die off. Hard to prove, probably impossible, but it is not even a new idea to think natural selection is too powerful and too basic to reality to be confined to biology.

Unless you can eradicate an entire species quickly and completely, all you do is set up a selection pressure which favors mutant individuals who have what it takes to beat your attempts to eradicate them. The ones that don't have what it takes to counter your attack, roach motel or whatever it is, don't survive, and don't pass on their genes which failed to adequately equip them for survival and reproduction.

Arthropod life cycles are very fast so it's not even surprising to see evolution like this happening in just a few decades. I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner.

Part of the roach's success stems from its omnivorous diet. Removing glucose from its diet is likely a considerable hit on its caloric intake. If the aversion to glucose can be maintained while developing aversions to other abundant and nutritious food stuffs, like meat protein, we could bio-engineer cockroaches to become specialized eaters.

Specialized eaters are easier to control and eradicate. Furthermore, if they over specialize to the degree of Pandas and Koalas they may be bio-engineered out of existence. Personally, I wouldn't mind never seeing another cockroach again.

Another aspect of the success of the German cockroach (mentioned in article) is that they're colonial animals. If the food source runs out, they will simply eat each other and keep breeding... resulting in a slowly shrinking colony. Eventually the colony will starve itself out of existence, but generally the humans living near by will have accidentally given them some food that isn't the colony... resulting in the colony rapidly growing again.

Seriously, did the roaches actually evolve and pass it to their young, or did the specific roaches which HAD the sugar aversion trait simply avoid being poisoned and passed along said aversion to their offspring?

That's NOT evolution. Evolution is descent with _modification_, specifically through random mutation. Otherwise it's just population selection of existing genes. Which has never been demonstrated.

How ignorant can you be? Once you admit selection by fitness you've given away the farm, because mutations are a well established fact. IIRC the rate is so high that you probably have several variations that neither of your parents had.

It actually has been demonstrated in nature several times... one particular one has happened within the last 50 years in a moth populations camoflauge colors... every single moth ended up a different color that they never were previously except due to a random mutation that became extremely useful when their habitat changed.

Ever notice how African-American males are often muscular, large boned with large lips, and African-American females tend to have wide hips (thought to be better for childbearing)? This was due to forced mating under American slavery, where (unfortunately) slaves were force-bred to reinforce traits desirable for both hard manual labor and for producing more slaves. Compare an "African-American" to recent immigrants from Africa. Note post-slavery immigrants by and large lack those traits.

You know... most western Africans share those traits too. It's not because of slavery. I'd like to see any study showing significant differences between african americans and the population they came from (which cannot be explained by interbreeding with white & indigenous people).

I would have thought the evolution step would be the one when the cockroaches went from all glucophiliacs or all glucophobics to having a mix of the two. That might even have occurred before there were cockroaches for all I know.
The roach motels were more of a gene-ocide, killing the glucophiliacs.
I suspect I should read the article to find out.

Darwin called it "natural selection". "Evolution", like the OP "developed an aversion", suggests something active happened - these bugs changed - rather than something passive - these bugs are the only ones left (because the other ones ate the poison).

Darwin called it "natural selection". "Evolution", like the OP "developed an aversion", suggests something active happened - these bugs changed - rather than something passive - these bugs are the only ones left (because the other ones ate the poison).

Poor wording, or poor understanding of the wording. The individual bugs didn't develop an aversion; the population as a whole became more glucose averse over time compared to previous generations. Evolution doesn't happen to a single generation, or a single individual. It is the result of passing on genetic traits to offspring. The species evolves, not the individuals. Granted, from time to time a mutation may arise and contribute to the gene pool, but that's only a statistical anomaly in the process of evolution. The big mover is selection - be it natural, or artificial.

It'd be a hell of a lot easier to teach evolution if idiot writers stopped using Lamarckian phrases like "developed an aversion... and passed that trait on to their young" when describing natural selection.

Darwin actually called it evolution through the mechanism of natural selection. Evolution is the observation; natural selection is the mechanism whereby certain genes get "selected" for over the generations. The origin of the diversity of the genes is not covered by either term.

Those glucose-aversion genes had to come from somewhere. They may have come from mutation, or crossed from another species, or whatever. Whether they lay "dormant" (that is to say, unselected for) in the genome for centuries, or years before the environmental change that caused them to become beneficial is irrelevant.

Seriously, did the roaches actually evolve and pass it to their young, or did the specific roaches which HAD the sugar aversion trait simply avoid being poisoned and passed along said aversion to their offspring?

I'm kinda thinking it's the latter.

You're right, it's the latter. But for someone who doesn't understand biology (evolution), the latter is the same as the former!

I just can't believe how many such comments I'm seeing here. Where are the nerds?!

Selective breeding is based on positive feedback, where a human being selects the specimens with a desired trait and breeds them to get more of the same trait in the next generation. That's how you get house pets that do not stand a chance of survival in the wild.

What happened with the cockroaches is the same process conducted by mother nature; only the surviving ones can breed.

Now, here's the kicker for all of you high school dropouts. Both cases are essentially evolution [wikipedia.org] according to the definition in wikipedia.